Popular blogs hit by PR Reductions

[Critic]

I just came across a good post on earners blog about popular blogs who sell links and advertising having their pagerank chopped by Google. The post does make some good points about the use of pagerank and link building.

Bottom of the line, PR is not the be all and end all of link building, there are so many other factors you should be considering when obtaining links

[buldozerceto]

yes many high pr blogs dropped pr.
whats happening?

[wasabiventures]

Thank goodness the PR game is over.... maybe we can get back to seeing advertisers looking at bigger items than PR.

[Meti]

Originally Posted by wasabiventures

Thank goodness the PR game is over.... maybe we can get back to seeing advertisers looking at bigger items than PR.

I have to say I agree with you, it was like the webmasters were only looking at Pagerank for a time, trust me, there are more important factors than Pagerank - will you let a robot judge your web site, or will you let a user rate it? It's a question many webmasters should ask themselves.

Meti

[jg123]

Thank goodness the PR game is over.... maybe we can get back to seeing advertisers looking at bigger items than PR.

Unfortuanately I don't think the PR game is over, PR4 will just become the new PR6 or worse the many 1000's of sites that did not receive a downgrade in PR will simply raise their prices sky-high.

[Meti]

If they do - I can assure you that it won't take G much time to repeat the actions (they obviously did)

Meti

[jg123]

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. I think Gooogle would be afraid of punishing too many sites because the ripple effect will certainly piss off a lot of other sites that don't buy or sell links. Turning the entire webmaster tide against them could have long-term negative results and give some of their competitors a big opening.

Since Gooogle can't read minds there is not real way to prove that a site is selling links (unless it is blatantly advertised on the site itself), the only other sure way of knowing is to start 'sting' operations and I seriously doubt they are willing to commit the huge manpower needed to accomplish that.

[Meti]

Interesting point you've made - yes I'm also interested in how things will play out. I mean if Google penalizes too many web sites due to link selling, I believe they will lose a lot of respect - some webmasters may even stop using Google as their preferred search engine.

Another interesting aspect, even though G doesn't have real minds, some webmasters see PR as a important factor, if we, webmasters stopped seeing it as a factor, there wouldn't be such threads going on at webmaster forums such as DP.

Should a user rate our web site, or should we let a system do it? I think we all would vote for the 1st option, therefore tell me, why is Pagerank important? We both know daily net users don't care about Pagerank in any way.

Meti

[jg123]

Page rank is impotant because of the same reasons 'hot or not' sites have flourished. People have a facination with putting a number value on things so you can compare them to other things.

This would be a perfect time for Yahoo and/or MSN to launch a ranking system of their own. If I was to launch one I would base it out of 20 to give more leeway for adjustments. To tell you the truth I am suprised none of the other search engines have done so, considering how much 'press' Gooogle gets regarding it.

[Meti]

Not a bad idea, that would at least create a balance between the G Pagerank system. Not to mention if any search engines develop such features they would gain a lot of respect, and not to mention the balance between search engines & google pagerank system.

Meti